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Document No. 45: Memorandum of Results of the Chiefs of General Staff Meeting regarding Reorganization of the Warsaw Treaty, March 1, 1968 ——————————————————————————————————————————— Since 1965 the Soviets had been trying, without much success, to bring about greater institutionalization and a tightening of controls within the Warsaw Pact. By the end of 1967, the matter had taken on added importance with NATO’s recent steps toward greater consolidation following recommendations made by the Harmel Report13 prepared by Belgium’s former foreign minister. As a result, Moscow convened several important meetings of its allies, one of which is summarized in this memorandum. A key issue in reorganization of the Pact was the creation of a Military Council, which was supposed to be the counterpart to the NATO Military Committee. The meeting concluded without concrete results. ____________________ […] During February 29–March 1 of this year a meeting was held in Prague on the level of army defense ministers’ deputies of member-states of the Warsaw Treaty concerning the establishment of principal institutions of the Unified Command. Marshal Iakubovskii—the Supreme Commander of the Unified Armed Forces, directed the meeting, and the armies of individual states were represented by delegations with chiefs of general staffs as their leaders. […] […] The organizer of the meeting, the Command of the Unified Armed Forces, used as a focal point, repeatedly emphasizing it, that the matter of establishing the Staff of the Unified Armed Forces and the Committee on Technology was agreed upon at the conference of defense ministers in May 1966. Therefore, the fundamental object of this meeting was to coordinate a draft statute for the Military Council. Bringing up the issue of the Military Council during the talks meant contradicting the stance of the Romanian side, which has demanded the establishment of such an institution during previous meetings. At that time, disapproving the Romanian proposal on this matter was a result of the fact that it [the Romanian side] assumed that the Military Council would function on the principle of unanimity (actual “veto rights”).BecausetheRomaniancomrades,duringpreparatorytalksledbytheSupreme Commander during his recent visit to Bucharest, supposedly decided to abandon the idea of unanimity, grounds emerged for elaborating to a document, which in this case would be an expression of bilateral compromise. […] 13 For details, see Helga Haftendorn, NATO and the Nuclear Revolution: A Crisis of Credibility, 1966–1967 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), and “The Future Taks of the Alliance: NATO’s Harmel Report, 1966/67,” ed. Anna Locher and Christian Nünlist, http://www.ethz/php/collections/coll_Harmel .htm. 249 Every delegation—except for the Romanian—has expressed their full support for the proposed draft and once again has validated the need to establish principal institutions of the Unified Armed Forces. […] The Romanian delegation has definitely avoided taking a fundamental stance in the matter of the draft statute about the Military Council, as well as [in the matter of] the proposal to establish the Staff of the Unified Armed Forces and the Committee on Technology. According to the Romanian comrades the main and principal problem is defining the overall position of the Unified Command, its relation to the governments of member-states of the Warsaw Treaty and the Political Consultative Committee, a method of nominating the Supreme Commander, etc. According to the Romanian delegation these matters should be expressed in the statute of the Unified Command, in which detailed competences of the Military Council, the Staff, the Committee on Technology of the UAF [Unified Armed Forces], and others should also be settled. In this case, there would be no need to work out a separate statute for the Military Council. When it comes to the Staff and the UAF Committee on Technology, the Romanian delegation believes that despite the fact that the, essentially, accepted protocol on this matter was signed by every defense minister (including Romania’s then-Minister of Armed Forces) in May of 1966—it is still an open matter. As was declared, the above-mentioned protocol was evaluated by the Romanian leadership as a [protocol ] which does not concern relations that should exist between our socialist countries , and for that reason it [protocol] cannot be treated as binding. The Romanian delegation has also opposed the institution of the representatives of the Supreme Commander for individual armies, regardless of the fact that this problem was not included in the matters under discussion. To rationalize its standpoint, [the Romanian delegation] has stated that an institution of representatives warps...

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